Christina Strawberry, a 17-year-old apprentice with GP Squared Construction, pries off a base board in a house under renovation.

Photograph by: JASON FRANSON

The program allows high school students in Alberta to accumulate hours toward their first year apprenticeship while earning money (at least minimum wage) and high school credits. More than 1,200 students in 242 Alberta high schools participated in the program last year.

Strawberry, a Grade 12 student at Edmonton’s Queen Elizabeth High School, is apprenticing in carpentry.

“I wanted to challenge myself,” said the 17-year-old.

She’s working full-time this semester at GP Squared Construction, where foreman Alex Somers describes her as one of the company’s top employees.

Somers said while Strawberry is the first female RAP student the company has employed, her age and gender have been irrelevant on the work site.

“She has surpassed so many people, including employees who have been here longer,” Somers said. “Her retention is absolutely amazing.”

“I like that I learn something new every day,” Strawberry said of working at GP Squared. “It’s nice to be part of the process of a house going up and seeing all the work that’s put into it.”

While Strawberry hopes to enter acting school in Los Angeles after high school, she thinks she’ll return to carpentry in the future.

“This is definitely an awesome job and I will continue it.”

Strawberry’s mom, Pamela Spurvey, was initially surprised to hear her daughter wanted to be a carpenter.

“I wasn’t really sure at first. I didn’t know much about RAP, but then Christina told me how it could lead into a career choice for college,” Spurvey said. “Now she just loves it and she’s good it. She’s flourishing in it.”

Getting “smart, young people involved as tradespeople” has been a goal since the apprenticeship program began, said Alex Gordon, one of the original members of Careers: The Next Generation, a not-for-profit that now oversees the RAP.

The program started in 1991 in smaller communities where companies in the resource sector were struggling to bring on new apprentices. It expanded to Edmonton and Calgary in 1995.

Tyler Cheyne is one of 14 students enrolled in the RAP at Sturgeon Composite High School. Cheyne, 17, started working with Northgate Chevrolet Buick GMC LP last June, apprenticing as an automotive service technician.

“I knew I wanted to follow a career path with cars and the RAP was a perfect path for me to follow,” Cheyne said.

He plans to continue at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and hopes to keep working at Northgate Chevrolet.

“I love my job. I like the people I work with and the environment,” Cheyne said.

Without the RAP, Cheyne thinks it would have been harder to get an apprenticeship.

“It really helped me out getting a head start in the trades. I would have planned to still go to NAIT, but probably a little later on,” he said.

There are many benefits to introducing high school students to the trades, said Enterprise and Advanced Education Minister Stephen Khan.

“We want to ensure today’s students understand the trades are more than a viable path, they’re a desirable path,” he said.

High school students learn about careers in trades through the RAP, Career and Technology Studies (CTS) courses and the work of organizations like Careers: The Next Generation, Khan said. For some students, that means discovering what they don’t like. Khan said he spoke to a high school student who apprenticed as a heavy-duty mechanic, only to learn it wasn’t for him.

“To find that out when you’re in Grade 11 is so valuable, rather than dedicate years of your life and then finding out that’s not the direction for you,” Khan said.

Not every student who takes the apprenticeship program in high school will go on to finish their trade and become a journeyperson, but since the RAP’s inception, 2,932 apprentices have earned their trade certification. To become certified in a trade, students continue their apprenticeships by working on the job and receiving a set amount of formal classroom instruction. Apprenticeships vary in length with each trade, the longest programs running for about four years.

Jerry Heck, vice-president of stakeholder relations and growth at Careers: The Next Generation, was superintendent of the Catholic school system in Fort McMurray in 1991 when 16 local students entered the new apprenticeship program to work with Syncrude and Suncor. At that time, the average age of a first-year apprentice was 26.

“That significant gap had a tremendous economic loss in terms of earning power. Lots of people in Alberta were questioning that and asking, ‘how can we engage young people?’” Heck said.

The answer was the RAP, which has become “a significant contributor to apprenticeship growth” in Alberta, Heck said.

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